On 3/31/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
If people don't like the idea of deleting unsourced articles, how
about blanking them?
More precisely, if an article isn't sourced 7 days after being tagged,
replace the article with a template saying "This article has been
removed due to lack of sources. You can still view the article by
clicking 'History'. Please feel free to recreate this article by
editing the previous version and adding sources."
That way, we're still preventing the public from unknowingly reading
unreliable articles (I would like to include a warning in the
template, but I couldn't think of a wording that didn't apply to all
Wikipedia articles - none of our articles should be relied upon for
anything, really), but we aren't getting rid of anyone's work, and
it's much easier to add sources to the article after the 7 days is up
than it would be if you had to get it undeleted first.
That would certainly deal with the fact that regular editors can't help in
sourcing deleted entries. Of course, we should avoid articles reaching
deletion stages to begin with. We should focus more on how to fix them than
how to get rid of non-fixed work (except perhaps in cases where inaccuracy
can lead to significant problems like biographies).